Organizing Design Patterns for Privacy: A Taxonomy of Types of Relationships

There has recently been an upsurge of legislative, technical and organizational frameworks in the field of privacy which recommend, and even mandate the need to consider privacy issues in the design of information systems. Privacy design patterns have been acknowledged as a useful tool to support engineers in this complex task, as they leverage best-practices which are already available in the engineering community. There are currently different privacy pattern catalogs coexisting, however, an ongoing effort is being made to unify these scattered contributions into one comprehensive system of patterns. To this end, the relationships between the privacy patterns must be expressed consistently. However, the catalogs available describe pattern relationships at different, incompatible levels of detail, or do not describe them at all. To solve this problem, this paper presents a taxonomy of types of relationships that can be used to describe the relationships between privacy patterns. This taxonomy has been validated against each individual catalog to ensure its applicability in the unified privacy pattern system.